Free The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

came back out of the house.
    “What’s keeping you?”
    Her wail carried all the way down to the town, and for years afterward the people of Kalaw would talk about how deeply it had frightened everyone who heard it.
    The doctor in the little hospital at the end of the main street was nonplussed. Blindness, at this age, without any trauma, just like that. He had never known of anything like it. He could only speculate. It could hardly be a brain tumor, since the patient exhibited neither dizziness nor headaches. Perhaps some neural or genetic disorder. Without knowing the precise cause, he could not prescribe any therapy. There was no remedy. The best one could hope for was that his eyesight would return as mysteriously as it had failed.

Chapter 13
     
    IN THOSE FIRST months Tin Win struggled to reclaim his world—the house, the yard, the nearby fields. He sat for hours in the yard, at the fence, on the stump of the pine tree, under the avocado tree, and before the poppies, trying to discover whether each place, each tree had its own unique fragrance, like a person. Did the garden behind the house smell different than it used to?
    He paced out his pathways, calculating distances and drafting mental maps that incorporated everything his feet and hands touched, every bush, every tree, every stone. He wanted to preserve them. They would replace his eyes. With their help he would impose order on the opaque fog enshrouding him.
    It didn’t work.
    The next day nothing would be where he remembered it. As if someone had rearranged the furniture overnight.Nothing in this world had a fixed place. Everything was in motion.
    The doctor had assured Su Kyi that the other senses would eventually compensate for the loss of eyesight. Blind individuals learn to rely on their ears, their noses, and their hands, and in that way, after a phase of acclimation and readjustment, they learn to renavigate their environment.
    For Tin Win the case seemed to be precisely the opposite. He tripped over stones he had known for years. He collided with trees and branches upon which he had previously clambered. Even in the house he ran into doorjambs and walls. Twice he would have stepped into the fire pit had Su Kyi’s timely cries not spared him.
    A few weeks later, on his first venture back into town, he was nearly run down by a car. He stood at the roadside, listening to the sound of the approaching motor. He heard voices and footsteps, the snorting of a horse. He heard birds and chickens and an ox defecating, and none of it made any sense or gave him any indication of which way to go. His ears were of less use to him than his nose, which could at least smell a fire, or his hands, which could alert him to obstacles. Not a day passed without torn knees, dark bruises, bumps on the head, or scrapes on his hands and elbows.
    It was especially hard at school with the nuns and the padre from Italy. Although they now allowed him to sit in the front row, and although they frequently inquired whether he was following the lessons, he understood less and less of what they said. In their presence he felt lonelierthan ever. He heard their voices and felt their breath but couldn’t see them. They stood beside him, an arm’s length or a hand’s breadth distance, yet they were out of reach, miles away.
    The proximity of other children was even more intolerable. Their voices unnerved him and their laughter still rang in his ears when he lay in bed at night. While they ran about in the courtyard next to the church, romping and frolicking, he would sit on a bench under the cherry tree as if tied to it, and with every step he heard, every cry, every expression of joy, however insignificant, he felt the bonds tightening.
    Su Kyi was unsure whether the world had truly melted away before his eyes or Tin Win had somehow buried himself far from it. And if he was so inclined, how far would he go? Would his ears, too, eventually cease to function? His nose? Would his